Description of the artwork

The artwork Les couleurs : sculpture, by Daniel Buren, is
described as follows on the website of the
Pierre
& Marie Curie University, which hosts a part of the artwork:

The central tower of the University hosts a flag, which is a part
of an artwork called Les couleurs : sculpture. The artwork is
made of at least 15 banners, each of them being 2 m x 4 m and hoisted
on the top of a private or public building in Paris. The complete
artwork, i.e., the whole set of flags, can be seen from the
[upper] terraces of the Centre Pompidou [a very controversial
building located in the center of Paris, a.k.a. Centre Beaubourg,
hosting inter alia the National Museum of Modern Art], either with
naked eye or binoculars placed on the terraces for that purpose. The
flags are made of alternating [vertical] coloured (one colour per
flag) and white stripes of 8.7 cm width [this size is Buren's "golden
number", which he also used in his controversial columns placed in
the Palais-Royal courtyard]. There are five colours: blue,
orange-yellow, violet, red, and green. The Beaubourg Museum is unique
because the city and the whole artwork can be seen from its terraces
[through the windows of the facade]. This flag design was already
used by Buren for the opening of the Center Pompidou in 1977. Daniel
Buren expresses a dialectic between inside and outside and questions
essential notions of painting, such as perspective and framing.

The aforementioned website shows a violet striped flag. It has 45
stripes, with a coloured stripe at hoist and fly. This makes a flag
of 3.915 m length, probably approximated as 4 m in the above
description. However, 400/8.7 = 45.897 and we may have expected 46
stripes to better approximate 4 m.

An other question is where the 15 flags are. From various sources,
including my personal observation on 1 October 2002 in Paris, the
current list is the following:

BHV [Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville, a general
department store]

St. James' Tower (Tour Saint-Jacques)

Théâtre de la Ville

Theâtre du Châtelet

La Samaritaine [a general department store]

Bourse du Commerce

Galeries Lafayette [A general department store]

Panthéon

Louvre museum

Grand Palais museum (orange yellow flag)

Pierre & Marie Curie University(violet flag).

Therefore, we lack 4 locations and 13 colours.

The design of the flags was also described in a paper published in
Le Monde on 26 June 2002.